Bleep

After a breakout year in 2017, Yaeji has taken her time over her next move. The patient approach very much pays off on her new mixtape WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던, the first substantial drop from the underground star since the celebrated EP2 emerged towards the back-end of 2017.

While house does not exert as strong of an influence on WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던 as it did on Yaeji’s previous records, the Brooklyn-based artist still serves up several off-kilter club tracks here. ‘Waking Up Down’ and ‘When I Grow Up’ are both charming club-pop numbers whose dinky synths are squirrelled away under Yaeji’s chatty, intimate vocals. The party gets freakier when Shy One and Victoria Sin join in on ‘The Th1ng’, a track whose Jersey club drums and ominous little anti-melodies bringing to mind Zebra Katz’ recent Less Is Moor LP.

WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던 also sees Yaeji making some of her most unusual and risk-taking music to date. The Nappy Nina-featuring ‘Money Can’t Buy’ is particularly head-scrambling - the deadpan delivery of something like EP2 hit ‘Raingurl’ remains, but here it is thrown into a weird sonic maelstrom that sounds like a bootlegged copy of Dizzee Rascal’s music-box-grime track ‘Dream’. In the way that it juxtaposes dreamy singing with grizzled synths and clattering breakbeats, ‘In The Mirror 거울’ steers close to Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene, and several tracks here find Yaeji manipulating her vocals to create odd, slightly alien tones. It’s daring stuff made all the more impressive by the fact that Yaeji’s music contains a sense of friendly warmth throughout - something emphasised by a smattering of washed-out r ‘n’ b tunes periodically ground WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던.

Yaeji returns triumphantly on new mixtape WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던, a set that maintains her oddball bedroom-pop charm while also delivering some of her most sonically adventurous work.